


Elliptic Integral

by speakmefair



Series: the metaphysics of arithmetic [1]
Category: Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Dark Imagery, Fermat - Freeform, Mathematics, Multi, Theology, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-04 20:14:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/714629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark gets to know Lisbeth Salander on her hackers' network, during the time when she's working on Fermat's Theorem.  Everything that happens afterwards is proof of the impossible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elliptic Integral

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many people to thank for this, the usual suspects being of course top of the list, but primarily in this case my dearest K, who took what I had and made me think hard about what I was trying to say.

"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."  
\-- Pierre de Fermat.

 

**i. {plague of continuous functions}**

Lisbeth has never made the attempt to deal in anything but absolutes, and does not allow for contradiction. 

She obeys the laws of nature, because she is alive; she is bound by them because she lives, but nature itself is not her goddess, and she has no time for the metaphysical, neither in thought nor when she looks at what she has done and plans to do. 

_I am my own proof of life._

Her proofs are those which her existence reveals, she learns by example and deed. 

She contains no multitudes, she is herself entire, and she cares nothing at all for her own inherent dichotomy. She knows that her apparent dichotomy of existence is all the world would see if they knew every aspect of her story, and she doesn't care about that, either. 

She is a victim, therefore she is a survivor; she is a killer, therefore she is a savior; she will not allow herself regret and so, she assumes, she feels it for everything. Opposition in her nature is what makes it a fixed point, her actions are only reflections of her beliefs.

_When I have woken up, I am awake._

She knows that she must have facets to her being, because that is what makes her a part of humanity, and she would never attempt to deny what she must be, having been born. She was born, therefore she breathes; she was born with a rational and reasoning mind, therefore she acts and thinks.

She is a functional composite of her own behavior.

She loves and hates, but she subsumes her torment to its own ends, admitting of no uncertainty but the future, for with everything she can be and has been, she does not prophesy.

No outcome is certain save the ones she creates herself; as with any equation, it is the working of it which gives truth.

_When I breathe, I live._

She has killed. She will kill again, if circumstances show that to be the natural result to the working theorem that is her life. She may be killed herself, but she cannot predict that for a certainty, any more than she can say how many years and months and days might be remaining to her. 

_I cannot dictate my heartbeat._

She will die, however, this much at least she knows for sure. She does not know when, nor does she think that what might or might not happen after that is of any importance.

_I love and am in love, that is a result of living._

She does not doubt her capacity for emotion. Not for rage, or hate, or grief; not for joy or love or the heady delirium of success. That she may count all these things in a different way to the world around her concerns her not at all.

She exists and continues, and her existence is the theory to which her actions are the proof.

She acknowledges failure when that, too, is a proof and a result and no longer a hypothesis.

She does not know why she is not enough for Blomkvist.

She does not waste time on trying to find an impossible answer that is only his to give.

She acknowledges her own cowardice in not wanting to receive that answer from him.

She acknowledges her own strength in being able to live without that answer.

_I am a coward because I am brave. I am brave because I am a coward._

Lisbeth finds amusement in the idea of having been a child, if to have been one means that she once saw the world _through a glass darkly_. For her, it is all clear, and always has been. The undimmed and the theoretical absolute is the world she sees.

The only difference now is that she has the words and the experience to name it — to name love, to name hate, to name fear, to name grief and misery and know that they are in no way the same emotion, though they can at times be equally consuming, equally overwhelming: they are the undertow of a strong tide that might drown her if she does not take care. 

She can name want and desire and longing, the three components of a whole that are so often confused one with another, and know them all for the separate things they are.

She knows that joy is something she can possess, and that contentment, perhaps, is not.

Lisbeth does not say to herself that there are some things she does not deserve. They have happened, they are part of her, they can be revenged, paid back, she can be the avenger and the avenged and still it changes nothing.

She will say without hesitation that there are things which no-one deserves until they are the perpetrator.

Lisbeth lives out her _therefore,_ and admits no _if only_ to her conscious mind. The past cannot be reversed, actions cannot be undone, the future is not set out until she chooses to enact it and forces it through her actions to become part of the path that lies behind her.

_I strive for the absolute because it is an outcome. I strive for an outcome because I know that all outcomes are possible._

Everything that exists is possible. It must be, because it exists.

Everything that might exist in the future is already an absolute because it has been conceived of. It can no more be rewritten, being unknown, than the past, which is an accepted fact.

She understands this.

_I am alive, I live, I am flawed, I am perfect, I am whole and I am broken into that whole, and all of this is true._

She hides in plain sight, she is the heroine of her own story, she is the living proof of her own rights. She admits her own flaws (that she sees only the absolute, that she believes most of all in herself, that she cannot and does not want to trust anyone else completely, even when she loves entirely) and knows they are virtues too, when used correctly. 

That she is unforgiving of those same flaws in others does not seem a contradiction to her, is not a division in her nature — they are only flaws when they are lived out, not when they are inherent to another's makeup, and they are only visible to her _when_ they are lived out, when they are used not as virtues, not as a resource, but as a cause of suffering to those who live beside those flaws — so when else could she judge them?

Dishonesty is a flaw when it hurts another, is a virtue when it protects them; to lie to herself would be and is the same.

She has no taste for pain. But she acknowledges that there is sometimes a need for it to be inflicted.

She understands her own heart.

_I will never understand anyone else's,_ she thinks, and has no desire to change that.

_Everyone is unique,_ she tells herself, and so admits of no similarities.

_Perfection does not exist and cannot be created,_ she writes one day amidst her attempted solution-workings, a dark block of letters amidst the lines and swirls and numbers that make up her work on the last theorem, Fermat's ultimate proof that some things are made to not be.

She remains in touch with those she trusts, amid their silent, hidden network of information-gathering and codenames and secrets. She harnesses their curiosity as much as she does her own, and talks to those people who want to engage her abilities with no more fear of discovery than she has ever felt.

But there is, one day, coming into the place she thinks of as her own safehouse, virtual though it might be, something new and someone new, and that is more interesting to her than to tread along paths she has already mapped out for herself, long ago.

She burned the ground of her paths with fire, and she scattered it with the salt of her knowing, to keep it clear, and there is no reason to believe in anything but plain clear fact.

And yet, even though she accepts all this as truth, the man who so casually gives her his name still manages to tell her something new to her cosmos, something she didn't know was an accepted premise, and never realized before that it had been put on paper or into words, but is still something that she has suspected for years is true of a great many things the world has long since deemed incomprehensible.

The thing Mark Zuckerberg tells her that finally catches her attention, the one thing that makes him different from everyone else who has approached her without knowing who she is, the thing which singles him out from the myriad strands that make up her web of nameless knowledge, is that what she has known for some time might be the ultimate proof of theory is also the first property of a miracle. It should not exist.

It should not exist, and that is what he tells her. She knows that what he is _not_ saying is that whether it should or not, it _does_ , and that he must have had the ability to believe in the unknown, once.

This man with more money than she can imagine, and fame to match it, knows what it is to burn out one's own path.

She sees the future as an absolute. 

He sees it, or at least says he sees it, as a miracle. 

Fermat found a proof of impossibility, and said it was too large to write in any margin.

Mark created (whether it existed already, waiting to only be spoken into being by someone, no matter who it might be, is not important) something he believes changed the world. Lisbeth does not agree with him, because she does not accept that his kind of belief is necessary to accept results, but she cannot deny the results themselves, she cannot deny what he has made, and what that making has become.

Is that the miracle he's thinking of? Is this what he refers to when he talks of things which should not exist? This — thing — that he once made, and which has now taken on a life of its own? 

His strange network where everyone has to prove they exist before they are allowed to communicate (unlike hers, where to not exist at all is a skill, and one that is highly prized), his unusable folly of open life that anyone can view, that perhaps _was_ , once, imagined into being for the same reason as hers (talk to me, tell me your secrets, give up all you know into my hands, and trust my use of them). 

Is that what he means? She doesn't know and can find no clear way of asking him.

And Lisbeth wants to know, more than anything, she wants to know why he should feel the need to tell her that, why he should tell her who he is and what he believes, in a world where names and belief in miracles or any such divinely-inspired idea are unneeded and irrelevant and unnecessary.

It should not matter to her, in a world where people take names for themselves to be able to live openly while they still remain in hiding, why this man has decided to admit his identity, and admit it to her.

But —

_I am who I am,_ she has told herself and continues to tell herself, a consolation that is both bitter and necessary. And what she is, she knows as surely as she now knows the first property of what the world calls a miracle (it should not exist, Mark said, and those words haunt her, because there is no _should not_ when there is a fact), is very far from any god.

She is Wasp, she is Lisbeth, she looks like one thing and appears as another. Her sense of identity is sealed within, and she has no time for outward concerns except in how they please her inner self.

That _who I am_ can be something bound up in a name, in a life, in an identity that the world is allowed to perceive — that is something new.

It is a puzzle, it is an equation left open for the solving, and Lisbeth may acknowledge her own cowardice when it comes to the truth which only Mikael Blomkvist knows, but she has never been afraid of solutions that are there for anyone to take, that are not secrets at all, but are instead proofs positive that are there for anyone to read, if they take the time.

If they have the inclination to read on.

She goes to meet the man who has wrapped up his being in the name he was given by the world, who talks of the existence of miracles as though they are no misleading chimeras, but rather facts that make up part of the warp and weft of existence; nothing to do with some impossible divinity or supernatural power, but instead a given, an answer, a proven solution as clear as any number conceived of.

_The first property of a miracle is that it shouldn't exist,_ he had written to her. _But sometimes there's no other reason that something does. Maybe that's your proof._

It doesn't make sense, and that infuriates her. It makes too much sense, and that intrigues her. 

_Meet with me,_ he writes. _Why not? If you think the future's already an absolute, you can agree and it's already done._

She responds in riddles, which she thinks he will like. 

_Everything is an absolute. Even your ridiculous miracle idea._

_Not my idea_ comes the reply after a few minutes, which means she has somehow annoyed him. 

Perhaps because she is openly relating him to a belief system that she knows he scorns as much as she does (though he accepts it might exist, and she never will be brought to concede that for a second).

Her reply is as brief and comprehensive as his.

_What if I say no, and that is the absolute instead?_

His response appears more quickly than usual, which means either he has thought of this already, or he is drunk (he once said he only makes mistakes when he is drunk, that he's gotten better at calling himself on them before he starts, but sometimes they still get made).

_Then you already said no, right? Still doesn't matter._

She laughs.

She goes to the meeting in order to satisfy her curiosity, to discover the solution to an integer that is not in any way numerical or practical in its application, but only a brief distraction, a temporary fascination that she knows will leave her consciousness as soon as she has the answer.

She does not expect to find that her clear glass has become a mirror.

She does not expect to find a friend.

 

**ii. ( _n_ > 2) {no primitive solutions}**

Eduardo has learned that leaving things behind is an acquired skill when you want it to be without regret. It doesn't come naturally and it doesn't come easily, even when it's been mastered.

It comes with a lot of recalibration and a descent into self-indulgence which might or might not involve poetry and sentimental, self-absorbed music that pretends to be a scathing summary of life (Emily Dickinson, he has found, is in no way enhanced by Morrissey. Hope might be feathered, but it doesn't really go well with a description of someone's horrible Sunday and every day being just like that same Sunday) and sometimes admitting to both when in company.

It comes with a new country and money that never feels real and memories that are not yet (perhaps never will be) scarred over, but instead scab and heal just enough to be even rawer when they are unwittingly touched upon and re-opened and exposed to scrutiny.

It comes with learning that there are things which are general and things which are personal, and that he never should have confused the two, and that he will never be able to stop. 

It comes with finding out that he has limits of tolerance even for himself, with an unwanted understanding of things he never wanted to know, with a new twist to his worldview that he should have been born with and always resisted admitting he needed to possess.

It comes with learning that the greatest ironies of all come into being not just with experience or being told they exist, but with time and living and accepting them as part of a state of being; with realizing that when you demonize anyone, even as a cover for what is really being felt and said and played out, there is a small part of the self and the soul (and once, he remembers, he didn't think there even was such a thing as a soul) that is demonized too.

The mechanics of fault and blame; of trust and betrayal; of loving too hard and hating too intensely; the things that can never be separated into two unique halves, but remain like a spinning coin, forever showing both sides, forever indivisible, one and the same thing and yet entirely different, utterly divided and yet a whole.

He has learned one thing above all, the greatest irony he could once have ever conceived of, in the days when all he wanted was to be something new-made and clean and undeterred by any past knowledge that should have screamed out to him that some things were not meant to be.

He has learned that he is above all his father's son. And now that his father has finally cut him loose and wants no claim to who and what he is, and has vowed to never take pride in him again, he can see each and every similarity.

He sees them particularly in this new world of his, where life is so brightly lived and all its noise is muted by water when it rains, where everything has its moments of illumination, and yet that same light is created by man so very often. His new world of tipping and distorted reflection, in windows and in water-shining streets under a harsh sun, where everything seems to be designed to show itself in repetition, like a room of funhouse mirrors.

Even the streets conspire to make him look at unexpected aspects of the same concrete and tile that he walks along, his car windows are darkened to the point where perhaps no-one can see in, but he cannot see out, either, without first looking through his own face.

Glass and water warp, and there are days when he looks old. There are days when he can see the resemblance between himself and the man he once hoped he would never become.

It's fitting, really, that the distorted reflections surrounding him show more clearly than his own well-lit mirrors, beautifully situated within his elegant apartment, what he is sometimes very much afraid he has allowed himself to become.

_I am my father's son._

In these warm and too-bright mirrored days, when he can see those similarities because he has lived them out, he wants more than anything to reject them, and cannot.

Before this time of unwanted knowledge, when he could see none of them, he _had_ rejected them, and very easily, because they were alien to him. 

And now he is more than ever an alien himself, he is in self-exile, he has won everything that he thought he had lost, and lost the things he never knew he had, and he saw none of it coming.

He is his father's son, and his father makes himself consciously and deliberately blind to the things that are a part of him and that he does not want.

_My father won't even look at me._

Eduardo can't blame him. There are too many days when he doesn't want to look at himself. Oh, not physically, he can bear his reflection without difficulty, he can maintain an appearance that has nothing to do with how he feels, and everything to do with what he wants the world to see. He simply does not want to look at what he has made himself into.

He knows that despicably stupid and willfully ignorant and blind to the inevitable that he used to be, naive and outright _stupid_ that he knows he was, he would have rejected out of hand the idea that he could become what he is now — rich and successful and sought after, and all of that despite the injustices done to him.

He is a success story, he is valuable, he is wanted, he is all the things he thought he could become and remain open-hearted; he has all the things he thought he would gain for himself because he was owed them and it was right; he has everything and nothing, because it is all poisoned by the knowledge of what it cost him.

He is not so melodramatic, any more, (though he accepts he once was) as to even think that it has cost him anything important or meaningful; that it was some grand gesture of self-immolation, destroying who and what he wanted to be, which led to his actions. 

He's never wanted to play the martyr, though it was convenient and beyond useful to let others cast him as one.

But martyrs keep their souls intact, and perhaps it would have been better if he truly had been one, because he might not have lost his soul, but he has somehow tarnished it, like old and neglected silver — something not rusted or in any way near disintegration, but merely unpleasant to look at, something it is never quite possible to believe will appear anything but discarded and unwanted, even to the discerning eye.

He is not quite sure how this has come about. He only knows that when he was everything that was idiotic and credulous and accepting, he might have viewed his actions now and again with a kind of half-laughing despair at how damn _easy_ he could be, especially after he found himself doing something or having done something he had never imagined or had any intention of beginning, let alone completing

(he had been easy to manipulate into caring, easy to convince that he could trust, and oh, but it had been easy, back then, so very easy, to make him care and think he was doing the right thing)

but back then there was also this: that he had never once felt he was doing something wrong, never felt that _he_ was wrong, never considered once, even when he failed, that somehow he had put himself _in_ the wrong, no matter what the world and the law and Mark's signature might say.

And these days, it is hard to believe anything else, no matter what proof he is given otherwise.

Eduardo, for all his failings and all his ridiculous, discarded naivety, has never been fool enough to believe that a written answer is all the proof needed of an existing fact.

The art of losing. The art of leaving. The art of rejection.

They're not hard to master, it's true.

They're just surprisingly hard to accept, whoever the one is enacting them.

And in the end, isn't doing something and having it done the same thing?

He's left a country that he never belonged to, and been betrayed by a friend he can't call an enemy or think of in a past tense, and he's lost everything in a dilution and has more money than he can clearly imagine what to do with, and some days he can't accept any of it at all, because how is it even possible that this is who he is, this is who lives his life, this is what he must be, this is what is true?

Poetry and hybrid philosophy-theology and the _fadho_ and stupid, sentimental, over-the-top songs more suited to a moping teenager with hardly a single deed behind him than to a grown man who should accept his past, and none of it helps except to give him more words for the things he does not want to feel. 

He wants none of it. He needs all of it. 

He wishes he could finish the sentence he could never quite manage to finish, because it hurt too much, wishes there were someone he could say to, besides himself —

_My father can't even look at me, and I don't want to look at him, because I'm afraid of what I'll recognize._

That, at least, is a constant, and one he can view without irony.

He is afraid of what he might see, if he looks too hard.

And he thinks he's already afraid enough of the things he _can_ see, and has given himself no choice but to see, without adding to them. 

 

**iii. {I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.}**

Being Mark's friend is probably the most annoying thing in Dustin's life. Working with him is the second most annoying, but that's expected, because genius Mark might undoubtedly be, easy to follow he really isn't.

Dustin taught himself how to code in a weekend. Code isn't something you have to understand, though, it's just something you have to learn, remember, and then know (or at least _try_ to remember and then know, because most people have this little thing called a normal memory system, which only holds so much at one time) — unless you're Mark, who apparently doesn't know it at all, but understands it implicitly and has a terrible habit of making it up as he goes along. 

Which really, really shouldn't work, because hello, facts? Facts don't change just because someone has an idea — except, of course, if you're Mark, and then everyone can just forget about what makes sense and try to make the new impossible make sense, and then the only thing left to do is get drunk and suffer from a hangover instead, which at least makes sense even if it's incredibly unpleasant and actually hurts instead of just theoretically hurts, because what the fuck is happening to the known world anyway?

So yeah, the second most annoying thing in Dustin's life is the work bit, and it only merits second place because eventually, given enough time, alcohol, and ranting at people about the unfairness of life, (and a fair amount of ignoring it all in favor of trying to beat high scores on Mario Kart, or, if he's especially frustrated, Pacman) things work out. Sort of. Mostly. Well, they kind of do, even if he doesn't always get how or why. 

Which is all fine, because of the alcohol part, which stops him from thinking about it all too much and leaves him relying on his own brain, which is pretty fucking awesome, thanks, and because he can generally translate Mark's unheard-of and unknown leaps into uncharted and unknown territory into something everyone _else_ can understand.

This is not what he imagined his role in life would end up being, so he doesn't think about it all that often, because that way lies hangovers. Which again, yay with the reality side, not so much yay when you have one, because ow and also, sometimes although never to be admitted, vomit. 

The _most_ annoying thing in his life, though, the indisputably first-place-holding, incredibly frustrating thing, is the fact that he's Mark's friend. And damn, if that were a job and a named position, he'd have resigned years ago, because talk about the impossible to understand and not a known fact and why the fuck fuck fuck did I somehow agree to this because I really don't remember signing up for it? 

Yeah, that's pretty much a summary.

Here's the thing no-one has to know (but also something they tend to figure out pretty quickly) if they just work for Mark, because it's non-essential and not a factor. He never stops.

Not 'he never stops coming up with new ideas' because yeah, that's a given, and not 'he's never not working', because well, see above. He never. Actually. Stops.

And he has a really low boredom threshold, so when he's done with something, he needs something else new and interesting to take its place, and despite what everyone seems to think (which is sort of reasonable considering how high his insane output is) not all of it is ideas for Facebook.

There are days when Dustin wishes it was. These are also the days when he thinks Chris is _insane,_ for thinking it's preferable to be Mark's friend rather than working with him, because just no. A whole, horrible world of no. Because when you're his friend, you have to know things about him, and you have to, horrifyingly, sort of deal with them, or at least deal with the fact they're happening, and it's all really not fair. 

Like finding out, just for the sake of a random example, that Mark's latest Thing To Do At Three In The Morning is to have weird, weird conversations on the internet, in exclusive virtual private rooms that Dustin isn't supposed to know about and certainly shouldn't be able to recognize at a glance, and which Mark _definitely_ isn't allowed to know about, with people who are definitely doing something illegal, because yeah, hackers? Definitely geniuses, definitely Not Allowed, (and no, Dustin's never hired one because of brilliance, don't let anyone tell you differently, he'd never do something like that) and who don't feel the need to give any sort of name other than a fictitious and improbable handle. 

Mark, of course, and Dustin doesn't even need to look carefully at the screen and read what he's saying to know this, is telling them exactly who he is and not bothering with anything that creates a vague chance of plausible deniability.

Because yeah, why bother lying when it's in the cause of something like, say, self-preservation? 

"I am out of words and out of cope," Dustin announces, and Mark just blinks at him, because _obviously_ it hasn't occurred to him that this just might be a problem that other people will end up trying to deal with, of course it hasn't, why would it? "Seriously. I mean it. You can't just —" and apparently he really is out of words, because all he can do is make vague flailing gestures at Mark's screen.

Mark, completely unreasonably, is looking at Dustin as though _he's_ the one who's lost his mind, which is totally unfair as well as unreasonable, because is he the one holding stupid conversations about mathematics (which Mark is terrible at, don't let anyone tell you different, so again and as usual, what the actual fuck?) with anonymous hackers at god-awful a.m.? No, no he is not, he is the nice sane undeserving innocent who happens to have altruistically walked in to tell Mark to get some damn sleep, that's who he is, so how is this him being out of his mind?

"I'm having a discussion about Fermat," Mark says blankly. "How is this a problem?"

There is actually no sane answer to that other than 'You can't have a discussion about Fermat, because last I checked you didn't even know who Fermat _was_ ,' and Dustin really doesn't want to say that because a) obviously Mark knows who Fermat is _now_ and b) if Mark has invented the thirty-six hour day and somehow learned mathematical theorems during the extra secret hours, _Dustin_ doesn't want to know.

"Er, because you're having it with illegal people?" is what he ends up saying, which is probably worse and more nonsensical, but it's the wrong time of day if Mark wants sense from him, and yes, there is a right time of day to get sense from him and this is emphatically. Not. It.

"People can't be illegal," Mark points out, and Dustin is pretty sure he wants to put one of their heads in a blender, or maybe just a lot of alcohol and ice in a blender and then drink it, or just go home and pretend none of this has happened or is happening and he has no idea about any of it, because seriously. This is unfair, is what it is.

"Okay, no," he agrees slowly, "but they can do illegal things, and I'm pretty sure you being on this site? Is an illegal thing. All the illegal ever, or, you know, close association with."

"And I'm pretty sure there are a lot more illegal things not on here," Mark says, looking amused.

"Yeah, but they're not things which might directly affect, say, oh, I don't know, _what you do for a living_?"

"Well, there's still things which count, and I haven't seen any of them here," Mark says, and yes, damn it, he has a point, but still. Dustin has a point too, and it's a better one. And it counts, which Mark's doesn't, because his is abstract and a concept, and Dustin's is a thing which is happening. 

Right now. In real time. 

Dustin makes some kind of noise, which he intends to convey his complete disapproval, his not-giving-in, and his ability to disconnect Mark any second and then very firmly forbid him to do anything like this ever again.

"Exactly, you see?" Mark says, which goes to show that Dustin has actually managed to demonstrate his total agreement.

"No," Dustin says, in perfect replication of a man with a spine and the ability to out-argue Mark. "Just no, okay? I don't care what you're talking about, you can't do this." 

Mark's gesture at his screen is a lot less flailing than Dustin's was, and manages to say very clearly that he is doing it, he's not going to stop, and that Dustin is living in a dreamworld if he thinks anything he says is going to make a difference.

"At least tell me you've got a fake name too," Dustin says hopelessly, and gets look no. 3 in return, the one Mark reserves for people who are being completely and irredeemably stupid on his time and need to stop. "No, how stupid of me, right, yeah, sorry except I'm really not, and. And. Just. What — why — is this some self-sabotage thing I need to know about? Is there, like, a deep and cunning plan that's going to be awesome at the end of it and I just haven't worked it out because hey, it's horrible o'clock and no-one should ask me to make good conclusions?"

"Er," Mark says, staring at him a little. "No? What? I'm talking to someone. I didn't know I needed permission."

Which is completely untrue, because Chris made Rules years ago about what kind of communication Mark is allowed to have with people who aren't, say, him or Dustin, without going through a third party who can (hopefully) make him sound like a member of the human race. So he knows he definitely needs to run things that involve talking of any kind past Dustin at least before he says anything, even virtually.

Probably _especially_ virtually.

Dustin's really, really tempted to just disconnect Mark, except that's breaking the other Rules, the ones he and Chris wrote up in a fit of self-pity and sheer misery a long time ago, and involve, weirdly, things they don't do to Mark because it would be all kinds of wrong and because no-one's ever going to be in a good mental place to cope with the fallout.

Anything to do with disconnecting or breaking computers is there, somewhere, because yeah, no, some things even Mark shouldn't have to confront more than once in ten years, and that time limit isn't up yet. 

What they didn't say, even then, even to each other, even drunk as hell and unhappy about everything, and scribbling things down in an order of importance that Dustin's still not sure about, is that at least half of those other Rules came about because there's some things it's not fair to remind Mark of even when it was all his fault in the first place. 

And yeah, okay, that's something which _is_ kind of weird, but it comes with the bizarre package that's the friend bit and not the co-worker bit. 

'I'm going to get your attention via destroying what you're working on' is pretty much right up there at the top, higher even than the computer thing, and probably shouldn't be separate because, hey, it's Mark, and most people would assume it's the same thing — but it's not. It _is_ separate, and it _is_ different, and Dustin doesn't like to think about why, because then he has to think about how most people probably think he's in the wrong too, and how he probably is, in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn't change what he knows.

Because he knows, he does know, and has known for a long time, that contrary to popular belief, knowing what's right and what's wrong isn't part of taking sides, and taking sides isn't always a factor in what you do about things, and sometimes what you think and what you know and what you believe just stays in your head. Life, and Dustin's life in particular, would be a hell of a lot easier if none of this were true.

"Okay," he says, sitting down after taking a very long deep breath that does absolutely nothing to calm him in any way. "Okay, yeah, obviously you don't need permission, but how the fuck did you end up talking about Fermat?"

"Because that's what she's working on," Mark says, and Dustin seizes the chance to display unholy levels of glee, because he doesn't get to one-up Mark that often, and any opportunity that doesn't involve past mistakes or permanent damage is quite simply awesome.

"She?" he asks, leaning forward in exaggerated interest. "And you know she's a she how?"

"She explained it in semaphore while she was on vid-cam, obviously," Mark says very dryly. "I think she said? Maybe. She must have, or I wouldn't know, right?" 

_Yeah you would,_ Dustin thinks, because sometimes when Mark lets himself go with his gut about people he's right in unexpected ways, _yeah you would, because that's the kind of thing you can pick up on in the way people talk online when you'd probably never notice if they were here in your office naked and unavoidable._ Out loud, he just says, "Yeah, she must have," and hopes he sounds convincing and not at all like he's managed to over-think this in the space of a couple of seconds.

"Yeah," Mark says, sounding as unconvinced as Dustin feels, and then — "Anyway, she's not talking about the math, exactly. Just, you know, proving things. Which isn't illegal, Dustin, so stop looking like that."

"I'm not looking like anything!" Dustin says defensively. "Except me, because obviously I look like me. I'm just — confused. Because yeah, I probably shouldn't know just by looking at your screen the kind of person you're talking to, but I do, and it's mostly where people go to find out stuff that really isn't about how to prove an unsolved theorem, it's about how to get records on someone that aren't meant to be public domain, and please tell me that isn't why you were there in the first place, because that's a _really_ horrible thought, and — oh. Oh fuck, okay, let's just pretend I didn't work that one out and I don't know what I'm talking about and actually you just wanted someone to talk to about Fermat because you lost your mind somewhere between now and the last time we talked, which is like six hours ago, so wow, and yeah, you discovered math theory while you were looking for it? Makes complete and perfect sense, let's go with that."

"I in no way wanted to find a third party hacker to get information I don't want anyway and could get by myself if I wanted," Mark says obligingly, and he might have his denials mixed up, but he's got the negation down, so Dustin's going to give him a pass on that one.

"Oh good," Dustin says weakly. "So what — I mean, if you're not talking about the math, then what —"

"I told her about what you call things that shouldn't exist," Mark says, and it's Dustin's turn to blink, only he's pretty sure that his confusion is real.

"Okay? Er — what do you call them?"

"Miracles," Mark says smugly, "or at least, that's supposed to be the first property of a miracle, so maybe she shouldn't be too concerned about working out what Fermat didn't have room to put down, and just accept it. I mean, why not? Just because no-one worked it out properly yet doesn't mean it's not true."

"Math isn't miracles," Dustin says, disturbed and not sure why. "Math's fact."

"So are things that happen, because they happened," Mark points out, and what the fuck _is_ this conversation, what — "Just because you can write something down doesn't make it more real. Not everything's about ink, just because you can't erase it —"

He stops abruptly, and Dustin's torn between wanting to run away and wanting to make Mark finish that sentence and wanting and simultaneously really _not_ wanting to know if what he's suspecting is right.

"Yeah, but you can get ink erasers," he points out, falling back on random pointless fact as an escape route.

"And acetone works on it when it's — a glass board, or something," Mark finishes up hurriedly, and fuck, fuck, Dustin's right, he's got it right, and damn but he wishes he hadn't. "It still got written."

"Yeah it does, and yeah it did," he says carefully, trying not to think about windows and algorithms and things being unbelievably wonderful and brilliant, and something that was a maybe-miracle because it shouldn't have happened, and all the things that were so very wrong with it, and the _why_ of 'shouldn't have happened'.

"I just think miracles end up costing someone," Mark says, and he looks uncertain for the first time. "It's only that when they happen, you don't realize that part."

"So she's talking math and you're talking theology, only not really… er, more physics? Or ethics. Something. Whatever," Dustin says, trying to smile. "Sounds like a match made in heaven, I can see why you're missing out on sleep, lovely lovely sleep, because of that conversation. I don't see why _I'm_ missing out on sleep because of it, but hey."

"Because you chose to come here?" Mark says, with a fake innocence that sounds nastily close to relief, and a relief that Dustin's pretty sure is because he seems to be dropping the subject.

"Well, yeah, which goes to prove I'm an idiot and not a miracle," Dustin says, and Mark snorts, a wonderfully familiar sound that means he's chosen the right way to go about this. "So what, is this your new way of internet dating?"

"Ugh," Mark says, and then, "no, obviously, I'm not completely insane, why do you think of these things, _why_?"

"It's a natural gift," Dustin says, and this time smiling, or rather grinning in the most irritatingly smug way he can think of, is easy. "Envy me?"

"No, God no," Mark says, looking completely revolted. "Anyway, I'm not dating her. I'm just going to meet her next week."

Dustin tries very hard not to choke on his own breath, and fails miserably.

"Oh, fuck my life," he manages when he's stopped coughing. "Mark, you can't just —"

"And yet."

"Right." Dustin sighs. "So I'm coming with you."

It's Mark's turn to look horrified, which means it's his turn to _feel_ horrified, but sadly, this doesn't even begin to make up for the fresh hell he's just opened to Dustin's unwilling view.

"Ha," Dustin says in victory.

But for once, winning doesn't make him feel any better at all. 

 

**iv. { more important than to see the sources of invention}**

Mark likes talking to Wasp.

He doesn't think it's particularly important, in the grand scheme of things, that the first peaceful kind of conversation he's had, in what feels like more years than he's actually been alive, is with someone whose real name he doesn't know and who likes talking about theorems more than real ideas, but he figures it should count for something. Even if he's not sure what, and it definitely isn't important, it should count somewhere among things that count. 

He's also not sure when his internal voice of sweet and thankfully detached reason started sounding like Dustin, but he's pretty sure that it's like being exposed to bubonic plague — it's inevitably contagious and yet (obviously) not something which is ever likely to directly affect him, so in the same grand scheme of everything ever which he needs to consider, it doesn't even feature on the outskirts. 

Or at least, it doesn't right now. If his inner voice starts flailing and making weird noises at him, he might have to reconsider, although not about whether he likes talking to Wasp, because weirdly, that's a given.

What's even weirder and actually more surprising, because it in no way comes under the heading of _peaceful_ , is that Mark is looking forward to meeting Wasp. 

Which for him is kind of odd, because he often thinks that if he could leave all communication in the relatively safe hands of the typed word, it would be just fine by him.

Come to think of it, that's probably why Chris always insists on _talking_ to him, using the actual spoken word, and sometimes involving Skype so they have to look at each other, because deflection Mark can do without any problem when he's told what he has to say and how he has to say it, but putting Chris off when they're face-to-face?

Yeah, that part he's not exactly brilliant at, because Chris is some kind of ninja deflection bullshit detector, and Mark only has to breathe in a way Chris doesn't approve of before he's getting a very well-meaning lecture and feeling all kinds of badly-treated.

Dustin also makes him feel badly treated, but that's not because of the lecturing, since Dustin can't deliver any kind of lecture to save his life and he hardly ever has room to comment on how Mark should or shouldn't be acting. It's more because of Dustin being himself at all times and without remorse or consideration for others.

Dustin might, as he will proudly and loudly announce, be a far better human being than Mark can even approximate pretending to be on his best day, but Dustin is also prone to exactly the same kind of work-absorbed, non-people-interactive mistakes that Mark can make, except his tend to be louder and somehow cause less offense —

"It's because I'm nicer than you, and people like me no matter what," Dustin always says.

"It's because you opening your mouth makes everyone feel pity for your existence, since they then realize you have to live with yourself _every day_ ," is Mark's usual retort, and they leave it at that.

It's always better for them to leave discussions about personality or the lack of one alone. 

Mostly because there was a time when there was someone around who, for reasons that Mark's never worked out and no-one else has the courage to introduce into conversation, thought that Mark did have a personality and apparently liked it. 

Right up until he really didn't like it at all and lived up to his promise of trying to take everything away from Mark, that is, hence the not talking about it, not mentioning it, and pretending it's not a factor in anything anyone does.

Mark misses his friend. He misses _Wardo_. He doesn't miss the man who was trying to be the most rule-bound CFO ever invented, and he sure as hell doesn't miss the constant judgmental second-guessing of everything he says, but he misses his friend.

He misses being allowed to just be himself, and love unconditionally, and have that lack of condition be something that he never has to put into words.

He doesn't miss Eduardo Saverin, who lives in Singapore and apparently does fuck-all with the money Mark knows he deserves to have, but somehow can't stop thinking of as a gift he was pressured into delivering, wrapped up with the shiny packaging of being the bad guy and insulated with the ashes of what was once the best thing Mark had.

_I'm coming back for everything,_ that man, the man Mark doesn't want to know and who is nothing like the friend he remembers, had said.

_You won't get it,_ Mark had thought then, fueled by anger and fear and surrounded by wreckage seen and unseen.

He'd thought, as time passed and the depositions were talked of as though they were both the same, as though the Winkelvii and Eduardo wanted the same thing, he'd really thought for a while that all he was going to do was walk in there and prove a point.

He didn't know he was going to be told, in so many words, that he'd lost a friend.

That he's always going to have lost him.

The friend he misses, so very much.

Wardo, whom he misses because he misses having someone around who doesn't think that what he does and what he created is the sum of what he is.

He misses being able to just say things, and he never knew he'd given that up until he started chatting to Wasp, in her private hidden online room, and started talking to her about Fermat and miracles and making the impossible into a fact.

So yeah, Mark's kind of looking forward to meeting Wasp, because she doesn't seem like she's decided what he's like based on things written about him, even though he's never been anything but upfront about who he is, and she doesn't seem all that interested in what he does except for how she can relate it to her own work, and basically he's sort of fascinated and definitely curious, which are oddly nice things to feel.

Well, nice for a given value of 'no, this is not the most anodyne word in the dictionary, Chris, it conveys exactly what I mean it to, as in pleasant but hardly life-changing, now shut up.'

It's not like he thinks meeting her is going to be easy — even with the comforting buffer of (presumably) carefully chosen words between them, she's fairly abrasive, but Mark has enough self-knowledge to admit that so is he, and it hasn't put her off.

(The long pauses before she answers imply she's giving thought to what she says, given as she can hardly be that slow at typing. Mark's perfectly aware that his pauses can be just as long, thanks, and it doesn't bother him, so he assumes that she feels the same, since she's still talking to him.) 

Among many other factors, none of which matter all that much, this is primarily why he's _surprised_ at how annoyed he feels at Dustin's insistence that he be there when Mark meets Wasp for the first time, and he's surprised, too, at how much he really and truly isn't thinking of this as any kind of date, even though it sort of is, because they have, in fact, set a date and a time and a place to meet, and honestly, the paucity of the English language should be looked into before it makes something in his brain crack.

That is, if Dustin doesn't get there first and makes him entirely useless forever, and also incapable of dealing with anything but inanities for the rest of his life.

It's a distinct possibility.

"It's just," Dustin says for approximately the thousandth time (not that Mark's been counting, but that's what it feels like, so he's going with it as a nice round and impossibly large number of times that anyone can say anything over and over again) "she could be, like, a sting."

Mark really hopes that's not Dustin trying to make a pun. Occasionally, he says this in response, which is inadvisable, because Dustin either explains what he means or thinks he's being clever, and neither response is conducive to his _shutting the fuck up_.

Which is starting to be all Mark wants in life. 

Five minutes of no Dustin and his ridiculous theories, which would mean five minutes of Mark's not having to consider said theories, which would mean five minutes in which he could go back to feeling peaceful and letting himself look forward to something for once.

Which he says, eventually, and Dustin looks stricken out of all proportion, which is even weirder than everything else, because Mark's pretty sure he's said far, far ruder and worse and infinitely unkinder (if accurate) things in a much nastier tone both to Dustin and in front of Dustin, and none of those times have made him look like Mark decided to punch him in the face for no good reason and out of nowhere.

Mark resigns himself to the Twilight Zone that is Dustin's current emotional state, and tries to tune him out, because Dustin's saying his name in a way that sounds almost _guilty_ , which, what the fuck, and also _why_ , and how does everything end up being some strange quagmire of _feelings_? 

Between the not thinking about Dustin's worries and the not listening to Dustin's weird self-induced guilt-trip, the day goes by pretty quickly before it's time for him to meet up with Wasp, and it's been a pretty good distraction from all the things he's been determinedly not considering, like 'is it really a good idea to meet someone who'll recognize you when you don't know what they look like?' and 'how come I'm not worrying about this, I should be more worried than I am, because why would someone who likes to talk mathematical theory want to talk to me in person?' and 'why won't she tell me who she is before we meet, and did she actually say she was a she or am I making it up so I feel more in control of what I know compared to what she knows?' and useless unproductive things like that.

As it is, he actually gets some work done, thanks to the background distraction that is Dustin. Which is good, or at least comparatively good, or at least less horrible than actually paying Dustin and his own inner voice (which sounds like Dustin anyway, apparently, so same difference) any attention. 

Meeting Wasp, at the nice-but-not-too-nice bar she suggested, is nothing like as comfortable as just talking to her, so the fact he's been productive for the hours before he meets her turns out to be the best thing that has happened so far that day.

Wasp's name is Lisbeth. Wasp is not (despite what Mark assumed from her online name, because he can be made to appreciate ironic statements when he finally sees them for what they are) American or even, which would have been his second guess if going with the irony thing, a Brit.

And she's definitely not blonde. Which, okay, was a stupid assumption anyway, but hey. Coherent thought if following the path of Wasp-presuming, and easily come by.

Wasp is, however, wearing (Mark's pretty sure) as well as (fortunately for everyone) clothes, a wig. It's not that it's not a nice wig, it's expensive and glossy-looking and a natural-looking light-brown bob, it's just Wasp — Lisbeth — doesn't seem to accept it's there, which makes Mark pretty sure it isn't, usually.

Either that or she's just had it cut. Which would make more _sense,_ but somehow doesn't seem to fit the rest of her — not how she talks, not how she acts, not how she moves.

It also only makes sense that this would be how come Mark noticed her hair in the first place, which would be an obvious train wreck in the making to anyone who knows him, and which is, he thinks, probably not a good thing to say out loud. In fact, it's probably best if he doesn't mention her hair at all.

This being a good thing and the best thing and what he's decided on, it is pretty much inevitable that one of the first things he says, after some pretty fucking awkward introductions (because Dustin is _there,_ and, well, needs to be explained, inasmuch as Dustin or his presence can ever be explained in words people let Mark use in company), one of the _actual first things he says,_ is "Why the wig?"

Lisbeth doesn't even bat an eyelid.

"To go with my passport," she says, and huh. Okay. That's sort of an answer. 

Beside Mark, Dustin is twitching.

" _What_?" Mark asks him in some irritation (okay, a lot of irritation, but he's trying to _behave,_ damn it, because while he can ignore everything he's ever been told when he's at, say, his _own company,_ in his _own office,_ he knows there are rules when he's out). 

Dustin only makes an odd face, like he's going to sneeze, or something like that, mutters what might, if you were feeling incredibly charitable (which Mark so, so isn't) pass for an excuse, and leaves their table in a hurry.

It's sort of consoling to see that Lisbeth looks just as confused as Mark feels.

"Your friend is strange," she says, with what Mark is beginning to realize isn't excessive, careful politeness and a weird formality she's decided to put on for this first meeting they're having, but instead a slight accent that he can't quite place. It doesn't sound like a criticism. Just an observation. 

Mark shrugs, in a way that is meant to convey 'what can you do, it's Dustin,' and is probably just another offensive thing he needs to have not done.

"Yeah," he says.

Lisbeth just nods back at him in acceptance.

And just like that, they're okay, and she's Wasp again, and he kind of knows her. And it's fine. It's possibly even good.

It's not, however, remotely approximating _nice_.

It's far, far better than that. Which really doesn't explain how come Mark says she should stay with him, and not at wherever she's booked in at, and there is just _no way_ it explains why she agrees.

But. Somehow it's a thing that's happened.

And Dustin coming back and then promptly nearly strangling himself on trying not to say 'what the _fuck_ , Mark?' in front of Lisbeth is pretty much the best thing that's happened so far.

Judging from Lisbeth's expression, she agrees completely with this assessment.

 

**v. [θ = 2 _hp_ +1] {how can intuition deceive us at this point?}**

Eduardo sometimes gets the feeling that gremlins are real. 

Not the kind they made into a film, the ones you don't feed after midnight and need to destroy in some fairly interesting ways, but the old-fashioned kind, the kind that belong to stories of things that live under the bed and go bump in the night and co-exist with ghosts and ghouls and the bogeyman.

The things that no-one can ever quite put a finger on; the things that are only frightening to consider when all the lights are out and the rain is falling against windows, and everything is hushed by night into an odd muffled stillness that no passing car or soft after-hours voices can tear through.

The things that make his computer screen flicker once, so briefly it might be his imagination, when he opens a document; logs in to his private mail; chooses to look at the weather reports.

The things that make him wonder, insanely, if he's being watched, that make him consider putting tape over his built-in camera, in case there's a way of seeing through it that doesn't engage the light; makes him wonder if a bug-sweep should be done on his apartment; makes him think of changing every account he owns.

The things that belong to childhood nightmares and dimly-remembered terrors, and not to the man who lives out his life in a kind of peace and a great deal of comfort, in a place where no-one, surely, would care to find or watch him.

Things from ghost stories and old books and haunted worlds created from opium and morphine and the dark that has still never been given a good name, no matter what it is called.

Fever-thoughts, mad thoughts, dream-thoughts.

Ridiculous and untrue and unreal.

Things he isn't sure he wants to consider, things he can never be quite convinced he's not inviting in; never quite sure that he's not opening the window or speaking aloud the words that allow the monster to cross the threshold.

Monsters don't exist, gremlins aren't in his computer or under his floorboards, there are no such things as ghosts, and nothing that isn't clothes or shoes will ever be found in his bedroom closets.

Screens flicker, and no electronics are completely trustworthy, and if someone _is_ watching him in some way, they're not interested enough to do anything about it.

He chooses not to hope that somehow, he _is_ still of some passing interest, that he still matters in some small way, even if only for a cursory glance; that he has some importance, even now, to all that (and all those) he left behind.

He knows how to block communication as well as anyone, and he has. There is no good reason to believe he hasn't succeeded.

(There is no good reason to hope he _can't_ succeed).

His past is quite literally another country, and oh, but they did things differently there, and he never wants to return.

He never wants it to come and find him, he tells himself on the nights when every movement outside his blinds makes him startle into a strange waking; when every passing shadow of a branch over a streetlight makes him wonder if this is it, if it is now, if he was wrong and right all at once, and that perhaps he should have hoped, and should have let himself care, if even now he should let himself care, and shouldn't, should not, should _never_ dismiss his imaginings as only that. 

There are things that cannot be undone, and he was only responsible for a quarter of them; there are things that cannot be unsaid, and he is very much afraid that he was responsible for all of them; there are things that he cannot let himself contemplate, and he knows he is responsible for all those in their entirety.

When hope becomes a breakfast after a night without sleep, it is as bad as a cold supper of it, and as pointless and wasteful and unnecessary.

He knows this.

He _knows_ this, just as he knows that no-one can function without that same hope, if it's not given to some unhappy, far-off, pointless thing.

Hope is a thing with feathers, it is part of love, it is a bad supper, it is close to faith.

It is the name of his gremlin and the thing that lives in his dark.

And sometimes, rarely, very rarely because he so rarely allows it admittance, it is unendurable when it makes its appearance, and it scourges him raw.

He wants all the things he thinks he sees, and knows he fears, and doesn't dare to believe, and still, somehow, hopes for, to become real.

He wants the impossible, and he knows it.

But then, he once watched the impossible come to life, under Mark's hands. And he can no more pretend that's untrue than he can ignore what he's deliberately chosen to be.

So why shouldn't he indulge, while the rain beats against his windows? Why shouldn't he let himself remember, when night falls like a damp coat around his new world? 

He came here, after all. He came here, and he chose it because it's too far away for anyone to follow him or want to find him in any way that's more than some tenuous electronic link.

He came here because he knows that Mark will stay in the place he made for himself — _you had one friend_ , he said that aloud and he meant the past tense, which means there is nothing that will ever bring Mark to make that leap into the impossible again, this time for the sake of some emotion which it's possible only Eduardo felt — and leave that place for the sake of simply finding him.

He came here because he wants what he now has, this isolation, this constantly enforced detachment, and so —

"Why not?" he says aloud, sometimes, because he is alone and because there is no-one to hear him, and so he can. "Why not?"

He can't change what has happened. He can't alter the path he's chosen. He can't take back and doesn't want to take back — because it is true, all of it — a single word he's said, both long ago in the days when all things were to be believed in because they could be done, and they _were_ done, and he watched them happen; and more recently, when there was nothing left for him in terms of achievement except one simple thing, one stupid easy thing; a tearing down of all that wonder, because he was the only one who could even try, let alone half-way succeed. 

He can't take it back, and he can't change any of it, and he doesn't want to.

It's only that some nights — on some nights, and at some times, when the screen flickers, or he wonders if he has seen another image imposed behind the one he expects to be looking at — sometimes he wishes things would change themselves.

But wishing cannot and will not make it so.

And he chooses not to try to make it possible for beggars to ride. He will never again be the one who gives in, who makes a first move, who tries to be conciliatory or aims for some impossible, imaginary reconciliation of everything he —

no, he admits, not he alone, never himself alone, what _they_ were, it is what _they_ had that he misses so sharply and painfully and hopes is missed as strongly in return, hard as he tries not to and as often as he calls it foolish and stupid and a last remnant of a naive boy who should have known so much better —

what he was.

He chooses. He chooses. It is his choice, as it always was and always will be.

It is only that sometimes, he wishes it was not the choice he always had to make, and still makes, and will make from now on.

Sometimes, he wishes that nothing he knows was true.

And then morning comes, and it is the same as waking, in its removal of dreams.

And somehow, as impossible in its being true as that first moment of _thefacebook_ going live, and thinking Mark was praying, as impossible as his believing that some of it, any of it, could be for him, it is still his life, and the rain, sometimes, is still falling. 

And it still hurts.

But he can hope, and he can wish for day to come, and for an end to the waking dreams that his nights bring, and he can choose, and he does choose, and his days go on as well as his nights, and he is alive, and that has to be enough.

He will make it enough.

He _can_ make it enough.

It is, he tells himself firmly, all quite enough.

And he tells himself, too, that none of it is in any way a lie.

 

**vi. {she reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul; she gives life to her own discoveries}**

Lisbeth, much to her surprise, enjoys her residence in Mark's house.

She likes talking to him, she oddly enough likes _listening to him talk,_ even if what he has to say is never personal

(probably, she's honest enough with herself to admit, _because_ none of what he has to say is ever, ever personal)

and she's generally as close as she thinks she'll ever come to having that one elusive emotion she never thought she'd understand, let alone possess, _contentment._

Which is, in effect, absolutely and completely the same as being stagnant, and odder still than feeling this strange half-emotion which doesn't stir her to do anything or want anything or act in any way that matters, she doesn't mind it.

Lisbeth is content, and she is more than that, she is happy to be so — and it is new and strange and different and in no way unwanted.

Perhaps, she thinks, it is her time for this. Other women want children, are happy to put their lives on pause because something matters more to them than movement and immediate action, and she thinks that perhaps this, her own peculiar form of pausing, is the same thing.

Her child is herself, what she carries below her heart is a deepening self-knowledge that she never knew she lacked or needed; her energy is drawing inward for the first time, and she is all the things she has always been, and perhaps, she thinks sometimes, becoming more.  
More because those things are deepening in strength, their roots sent rain that she never asked for; more because now the quiet she finds is deliberately created, and not self-imposed and hard and a struggle to endure and bear.

She is left alone to do what she wants, during the day. No-one seems concerned at how she can lose time and herself so easily, following the lines of her own geometric equations to build proofs that only mean something to her, and perhaps will only ever mean something to her. She is still unsure as to whether she will arrive at the proof that was too narrow for Fermat's margin, or whether when she does (if she does) she will want to show it to the world.

She only knows that she is doing something satisfying, and that nothing more is expected of her. She does not know why this should be so, but she accepts it for truth.

Mark withdraws into his work as well, and just as easily and completely, and whether he is in her company or not, and he does not expect to be judged for it — at least not by her. She does not have to ask him whether he knows he _is_ judged for it, by most people. He knows what he is, and what he cannot be.

Sometimes she thinks he cares. Just never enough to change his behavior.

That being so, why would he expect anything different from her?

For the first time since she left Sweden and Blomkvist and any kind of hope in the sort of love that so many take for granted, she feels that perhaps she might find peace in a return to all of the things she ran from; that even though she was right and remains so, even though running might have been needed once, and killing too, it is not needed here, and not now; and that perhaps this understanding and this fact and this unasked for, new, simplicity of being — it might last, for a little while.

(She only ever needs a little while, before she can assimilate what is true, and accept it as a truth she must acknowledge, and a truth she might and does need, and then move on. She thinks that this, too, might be something she can be content with.)

There is a kind of peace to be found in a friendship that is also not really friendship at all, but rather (and possibly more essentially) an acknowledgement of an equal, of a mirror-image, a self-assessment that is not of herself at all.

She is hiding in plain sight, it's true, but so is Mark, and in a far clearer view and with a harsher aspect, from the world's perspective, than she will ever be unwillingly given (and the escape from that is something for which she thanks all of her luck and all of whatever fortune some unknown fate will grant and has granted her so far).

Lisbeth is content, therefore, foreign as the idea has always been to her, and, being content, is on another plane and in some other form and in some new way she has not quite adjusted to, happy.

Lisbeth is, as it happens, also quite astoundingly drunk.

Then again, so are Mark and Dustin, which provides her with a constant source of genuine entertainment — Mark because he is so much more _himself_ like this, the unfiltered man she had expected from his halting and slow and yet strangely free conversations with her in the safe house that is where Wasp lives, and Dustin because he is everything he hints at when he chokes off what he wants to say, and also more.

(And under the almost certainly false ebullience and the quite real amusement she feels, there is the sure and grounding knowledge that she is trusted; she is trusted for some reason she is as yet not quite able to put into words. She knows, with an underlying sobriety and the oddly crystalline surety only granted by inebriation, that they would never allow her to see this if she were not, that she is, for one of the first times in her life, not some outsider, not the observer, but a part of something, the details of which she might always remain hazy about, but which exist, nevertheless.)

Lisbeth, who loves and has been loved, and might well still be loved even if she cannot yet find the courage to ask the truth of that elusive and intangible and so very wanted _might be,_ is, for the first time in her life, in love with a moment of time. 

Not with her existence within that time, but with a moment, with the fact that she exists in that moment. She is in love with the trust which is being given to her and the silly floating bubble of laughter that seems to be in her throat. She is in love with life for the simple reason that it is happening, and happening now, and she knows that not all of that comes from the mysterious possibly-cocktails that Dustin has been making her.

She is in love with her own living, and it is headier than any drug has ever been; than any drink will ever be — it is new and it is wanted and she thinks perhaps this is the closest she will ever come to discovering the sublime that lies within her innate being. 

It is better than anything she has felt during sex, better even than when her body surpasses her expectations and brings her unthinking physical bliss, or when someone else gives that moment to her, an unexpected benefit of mere pleasure that she is always more than happy to return in kind.

Gifts, after all, should be received with gratitude, and it is the giver who should be thanked, and not one's own ability to appreciate the change in possession.

It is better than any forgetting of self or consummation of desire that she has been known to crave, and seek out, and lose herself within.

(She has never stopped being surprised that she can do this. Experience, after all, should have warped her into a state where her body can never trust, even if her mind knows that trust has nothing to do with it. It seems that her body is as fully knowledgeable as the rest of her, and knows the difference in others' intent, whatever it may have undergone.)

She is a long way from lost, and a long way from unthinking, and a very long way from becoming mere striving flesh, and yet it feels almost like that, it feels so very close to those brief and passing moments.

But this one continues, and does not leave her spent and aching, the cessation of the electrical current draining her as it curls around her energy and draws it out in fierce power, jolting her into spasmodic lethargy of both mind and body together.

Instead it goes on, as though she herself were the wires, like an untapped source of continuing voltage that she never knew existed and had only heard of in some urban legend, something she has always thought to be nothing but a strange joke she never saw the point of.

Something for others to imagine thoroughly enough that they could put it into words, something she has, until now, never really understood why they would bother to make the effort.

Something for others to have, something that is now hers.

And she relishes it, relishes it and laughs, and "Oh," she hears Dustin say, "oh, but you're beautiful, Mark, she's beautiful, how didn't I see —"

And Mark, Mark who is as much himself, always broken and always whole, just as she is, Mark who is a likeness of her inward-turning and unseen image, as she must be 

(though she cannot quite perceive it, the thing that she is which makes her the same as him, even though she can see what makes him the same as her) 

of his, Mark says "I don't know, but obviously you weren't looking, and everyone warned you about things that make you go blind —" and someone hits someone else with what is probably a cushion, and Lisbeth isn't afraid of their eyes on her, and she doesn't want to hide, and she doesn't want to be someone else or somewhere else, and instead she opens her eyes wide, both the eyes of her body and the eyes of her spirit, and smiles with a wide and joyful delight, because for once this is a kind of praise she is prepared to accept, and can enjoy in full.

_This is what other people feel,_ she thinks, and then, _this is how I made Mikael feel, and then I took it away without a word_

— and suddenly she feels something which is not quite regret, amidst her love and her laughter and her revelry in being who she is, something which is not quite regret, but is something else which is quite new, and this time wholly unwanted.

"Remorse," she says aloud, still looking at them with both an inward and an outward eye. "Remorse. It's not the same."

And Dustin frowns, and asks "What do you mean? Are you okay?" but Mark stops laughing, and there is no trace of a smile in his voice when he says "Yes. No. It's different. It's incredibly different."

"It — hurts," Lisbeth admits, can admit, is prepared to admit, now and for the first time, and Mark's expression is as close as anything Lisbeth has ever seen on a man's face to a full-body wince when he agrees quietly,

"Yes. Yes it does," and then says with a difficulty that comes, she knows, from rarely using the words when he means them and is not utilizing their existence as some kind of implicit accusation, "I'm so sorry."

He means _I'm sorry you have to feel this_. He means _I'm sorry you had to find this out now._ He means _I'm sorry I understand what you mean, because I feel it too._

He means all these things and a great many more things that she can't decipher, and suddenly being drunk is no aid to laughter and no joy at all, but only an enhancement of this _remorse,_ this desire to say, as Mark has just done, _I'm sorry,_ and mean it with every part of her.

Because she is. She is sorry for what she has done, and she is sorry for what she is, and she is sorry for everything she thought she had to be, and she doesn't need Mikael's answer to her question —

_Do you love me? Do you, did you, can you?_

— after all.

She already has it.

And it is _yes,_ and it will always be yes, of course it is, of course it was, of course it will be when she asks, and it was the _yes_ that she was running from and it is the _yes_ that she has found contentment in not hearing and not running back to and not accepting as truth.

It is yes, and yes, and yes, and the knowledge of this is an almost impossible pain, and she knows that this, this, these are the birth-pangs she was always meant to endure, this is the becoming of what she has been growing in secret under her heart, this is the time, and this is the moment, and these are the depths that she was and still is and will be, if she does not change her path, always travelling into and towards; this pain is her inexorable fate.

"What are you sorry for?" she asks. "It wasn't you."

But Mark has gone far away inside himself, just as she has, and the strange bubble that encapsulated them all is not burst, but rather shriveled into nothing, and he says,

"Oh yeah. It really was. And it still is," and Dustin, coming into awareness out of his bemusement, _does_ flinch, and hard, and Mark smiles at him once more, but this time it is given as another kind of apology, one which is something that lies only between the two of them and their shared past, and should remain so.

And Lisbeth, broken once more on the wheel of her own decision and the truth of its acknowledgement, finally knows what it is that makes herself and Mark one another's reflection.

It is not a knowledge she ever wanted to gain, or to have another possess. But it is knowledge, and that has to stand for something, and she will make it count.

She has to.

Because coward she might be and might need for a while to remain, but Mark has long ago accepted what he is and what he thinks he must always be, and Lisbeth knows, as surely as she knows that her time here with him and her strange new-found contentment must both end, that they found each other because she can end his path into some strange despair that no-one will ever put words to, just as he made her see the stony ground she was travelling along.

Here is the proof she came to find, here is proof that the impossible exists.

Here is the proof that the impossible must have an answer.

 

**vii. { the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons}**

Dustin doesn't know what's changed, only that something has.

It's not Mark's behavior to Lisbeth — that's the same as it always was, and it's not hers to him, even though it's somehow more, after the night when Mark said he was sorry for the things they never talk about, and Lisbeth looked for a moment as though she was bleeding to death, and they'd never noticed.

But they were all drunk, and things matter more when you're drunk, and Dustin's not sure of why those few seconds should have changed anything at all.

He just knows that they did, and he's not sure of _what_ got changed, and he's not sure _why_ it changed, and he's really not clear as to how it _could_ have changed, and the only things he's incredibly sure about is that it has, and that he doesn't know anything for certain, and that he really, really wishes he did.

Talking to Mark is, as always, completely and utterly pointless. But he tries.

It's not at all successful, though.

"I did!" he protests to Chris. "I did talk to him! I asked him straight out and he went blank, and what do you want me to do about him going blank, seriously, because there's never been a good answer that doesn't involve —"

And that, finally, is the lightning strike of understanding he's been hoping for.

"Oh fuck," he says.

"Oh fuck _what_?" Chris asks, with the grimness of long experience, undiluted by a tenuous phone connection.

"Oh fuck as in oh fuck I don't think we can fix this and maybe we shouldn't," Dustin replies. "As in, you know that one last rule we added to the very very top of the list we don't admit exists and you probably take out and read just before every time you talk to Mark?"

"Yes," Chris says instantly, because of course he does, and because Dustin is so very right about this one.

"Yeah, I think it just got deployed or whatever it is you do with rules, and I completely failed to notice," Dustin says. And he probably sounds pathetic, but oh my God, does he ever feel it, and he deserves to wallow in it and get sympathy, just for a short time while he talks to Chris and isn't dealing with Mark.

"Oh," Chris says, his voice completely flat, and then, " _fuck_."

"I said that," Dustin points out.

"Yeah you did. And yeah you were right. And fuck."

They sit in silence on their miles-apart connection, doing nothing but breathing at each other as quietly as possible.

"Well," Chris says at last, "you're there."

"And?" Wariness, Dustin feels, is more than justified.

"Your problem," Chris says too cheerfully.

"Yeah, thanks, I got that," Dustin spits out, and then, because he's still in the middle of his time-allotted misery-fest, "you know what the worst thing is?"

"Please, please don't tell me," Chris says, but there's the sound of a lost cause in his voice.

"You know right back when we wrote that list?"

"Yes?" Now Chris sounds wary, which is all Dustin could possibly ask for, right in this truly horrible moment.

"I think Mark knew what he'd done all the way back then," Dustin says, and is not even surprised when the line goes dead.

Chris, too, retreats when he's been shocked. And this is one hell of a mindfuck. There's no-one who wouldn't be thrown by this new information, even Chris. All his steadiness and acceptance can't make this one easy.

Because what Chris and Dustin were referring to when they added something, years ago, to the very top of a never to be mentioned list of Rules, is centered entirely around this one basic premise:

Mark is not as oblivious as he likes to pretend.

Perhaps the premise should have been instead that Mark is not as oblivious as the rest of them _prefer_ to pretend.

Sometimes it takes him a while to know what the implications are to his actions, but Dustin's now sure that it hadn't taken the depositions for Mark to see those implications when it came to the dilution. 

He'd probably known even when he told Dustin not to sign. He'd known all the time, and he'd stood back afterwards and let everyone watch the train wreck that had resulted, knowing how much they would all be hurt. 

He's always known, and this is what he was talking about when he said he was sorry; when he said he understood remorse. 

The thing that Lisbeth had understood in one second of being very drunk and a flash of self-knowledge, which had surprised Mark into responding in kind, is that it's possible, completely possible, to feel guilty and sorry about something, and still not want it to change.

And the Rule, the most important Rule, the one that's in capitals and has never been said aloud or ever mentioned or referred to by Chris or Dustin aloud or in writing since that night, even to each other, just in case even thinking about it makes it happen, actually reads:

_Mark is going to work out what he did._

Rules to live by, Dustin thinks bleakly, and says to his unresponsive phone, "But he never needed to work it out. He always knew. We just never knew that. We never knew he was already living by the rules. And he's still living by them. It wasn't ever just us."

He feels like Lisbeth looked, that night. Gutted. Sneak-attacked.

And in no way numb at all.

"Fuck," he repeats quietly to the phone, because there just isn't any other word that comes to mind. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

He wants, somewhere in a very small part of himself that always hoped before now that all it would take was Mark's sudden arrival upon understanding what had happened to make everything all right again; that small part of Dustin just wants to sit there and cry.

"I was _there_ ," he says, and God, Mark and Lisbeth were right, this hurts, it hurts like nothing on earth, to know you've been doing something wrong, deliberately wrong, for years, and be so damn sorry for it and know it can't be changed and that you shouldn't want to, because the time for acting is over, and the results are all that's left for anyone to live with. "I was there and I had to watch, and he _knew_. I just thought he didn't understand what it was going to cost everyone."

He's tried not to suspect that Mark had acted deliberately, because it always seemed unfair, seemed like a judgment of something Mark couldn't have helped, something that of course he wouldn't have done if he'd only calculated its impact on others. 

But Mark _did_ know, and now Dustin knows for certain that this, the worst of his quickly-suppressed suspicions, is true.

Mark has always known what he'd done, and he knew, all that time ago, what he was doing while he did it.

And Mark thinks that everything that happened after was exactly what he deserved, even though he must have thought back then — and probably still thinks now, even though he's sorry for it, (and he is, God, Dustin knows he is, you can't fake that kind of feeling in so few words, Mark is well and truly sorry for it all) that it was all necessary and all justified and all completely the right thing to do, and how does he live with that? How can anyone?

He remembers Mark saying to him, the day they met Lisbeth for the first time, when she was still the unknown quantity that was Wasp, "I just want to be able to look forward to something for once," saying it so very calmly and blandly and matter-of-factly, as though the fact he's somehow not allowed to any more is just one of so many small things he needs to take for granted. Just as Dustin's started to take his tone of voice for granted, just like he and Chris think — no, thought — that Mark was still unaware of what he had and _has_ , and still _is_ , damn him, given up and is giving up, all for the sake of his apparent miracle's continuing existence within the confines of reality.

It had hit Dustin, that simple little not-a-question, like a smack to the face back then, and knowing what he's finally understood today, it hits him again, and harder.

Because Mark knows, and Mark always knew, and Mark never meant anyone to know he knew, and he really, truly thinks he deserves to be exactly this lonely, and —

"I'm a completely horrible friend," he says to the still-silent phone. "And the worst thing is, no-one's ever going to call me on it." Call him on it, like he should have done to Mark, back then, and maybe none of this would have happened.

But no-one will say anything to him about the part he's played, in allowing this to go on and never speak up about it.

Not Mark, not Eduardo, not Chris. No-one. Because they can't tell him he's shit for knowing something they've all always been aware of, and they can't say he's wrong for not doing anything about it when none of them did or are doing something about it either, and Eduardo probably doesn't want to talk to him at all anyway, because if he did want to he would have tried at some point, right? 

And how has it all ended up in such a mess?

The worst thing about this is, they all think (well, maybe not Eduardo, but even he probably thinks Dustin's _trying_ ) that he's the good guy. Because out of all of them, who else fits that space?

Not Mark, who has bought the rights to what he made with the price of the one person who gave a damn about what happened to him.

Not Eduardo, who has rejected them all so thoroughly that he can't even bear to live on the same continent.

Not even Chris, who always knew the things that were most important, and left them all to make those things real, even though he says it wasn't the same as leaving, Dustin knows what it is and what it was and what it means.

And they all, all of them, they think he's the good guy. Still.

Dustin, half an hour before, would have agreed with them completely, and now he can't, and it hurts, which he wasn't expecting, and he feels weirdly betrayed, which he also wasn't expecting, and he thinks back even further to something else Mark said, and knows it's true.

_"I just think miracles end up costing someone. It's only that when they happen, you don't realize that part."_

"Not someone," Dustin whispers. "Everyone. Oh Mark, you stupid fuck."

_Remorse,_ Lisbeth had said that night, drunk and beautiful and so very hurt, and _I'm sorry,_ Mark had said in reply, and oh, how Dustin wishes he still didn't understand any of that and that none of it had ever been said and that no-one was ever going to have to admit anything.

"The first property of miracles," Dustin manages to say to the quiet, forcing the words past his closing throat; Dustin who knows that he is more alone in this moment, while he lives in the here and now, sitting at his desk and completely unable to do anything that could be of any use to anyone; who knows that he is more alone than he ever has been and perhaps ever will be again, "The first property of miracles is that they shouldn't exist."

And then, finally, he can cry, because it's true, and it's real, and they've all paid the price, and the price is too high, and because —

Because there are some things that deserve, whatever the rest of the world might think, to be mourned.

And loss of belief in things, however misplaced, is definitely among them.

 

**viii. {the ancients did not know everything}**

Mark has to admit that if there is one thing Lisbeth knows way better than he does (something that isn't math, at any rate) it's how to find someone's underbelly.

His own vulnerable spot just happens to be that time between five and seven in the morning, when the body still thinks it ought to be asleep (and in his case often hasn't been) and the brain is perfectly capable of functioning all on its own, without any help from common sense or the ability to filter what the mouth should be doing.

So when she wakes him up from a rare but incredibly deep sleep, he doesn't have the ability to even say 'go away', or, more essentially, 'no', or possibly even a 'no, fuck no, and also no, whatever it is, _no_ , and go away while there is a world of no to live in.'

What he says, whatever his body really wants, is,

"Mrrwha?" followed by an approximation of 'Are you okay?' which probably sounds nothing like that but is apparently what, for some unknown to him and completely obscure reason, his brain thinks is appropriate as a sort of, almost, response.

"I am," Lisbeth says, too serious for either the time of day or his ability to cope with anything at all when it _is_ that time of day. 

Which it definitely is.

He manages to get his eyes completely open and to focus on her, and yes, yes she is okay, she's more than okay, she's not wearing the stupid not-her wig, and she's wearing a tank top that shows her tattoos, and all of this is being done without the weird exhilaration she gets at times (which is really gorgeous to watch but so very exhausting to participate in) and she's perfectly fine, and that's all good.

_She's herself_ , Mark thinks blearily, and then _when did she stop thinking hiding was better?_ and then he just stops caring about any of it, because oh God, sleep, and his body isn't feeling co-operative at all towards being talked at, even though his brain is apparently being all obliging.

He lets his eyes close again.

" _Mark_ ," Lisbeth insists, right in his ear, and _ow_ , noise _hurts_ when it's that close. "You need to wake _up_."

"Ugh. Can I have a choice? Because. No. Don't want."

"No, don't care, yes you must," Lisbeth says in a kind of chant, still right in his ear and still very painful. "You need to see what I have done."

Which is not a statement Mark needs to hear, not at this time of day or night and not, really, at any other time, thank you, coming out of the mouth of anyone who isn't him.

In his long and often frightening experience, the equivalent to 'look what I did!' is always a Really Bad Thing.

Especially when someone wants him to genuinely look at it, as opposed to making the right sort of noises and making it very much somebody else's problem.

Being as it's Lisbeth, there's no-one else whose problem he can make this, except possibly Dustin, and Dustin is being weird right now and is also an unappreciative person of anything at all happening at this time of the morning, particularly when it's Mark, and right now, Mark suspects, even though he has no evidence to base this suspicion on, pretty much _exclusively_ when it's Mark.

Nothing's been the same since the night he and Lisbeth sort-of talked, and maybe it shouldn't be, but still. In vino veritas can take a flying leap off the nearest high rooftop, as far as Mark's concerned, because he never needed to be understood and he never wanted Dustin to know about any of it, and somehow both those things have happened and it's been of no help or benefit at all.

"Look," Lisbeth insists. She's holding her laptop up, right in his face, so it's kind of impossible not to. "This is why you found me, isn't it? This is why. _He_ is why. Yes?"

And quite suddenly, Mark is all the way awake, body and mind together, and for one surprisingly alarming second he thinks he may never have to worry about sleep again, because whatever is happening to his heart quite possibly means imminent death.

"I've done this before, you know I have," Lisbeth says, which does absolutely nothing to stop Mark's incipient heart failure. "You know I have. That all of us have. You didn't find us to talk about Fermat. I was the one who changed the rules. And I enjoyed talking to you. I've enjoyed being here — no, truly," she adds, when Mark manages to get his eyebrows to co-operate with his current state of being, and demonstrate his complete skepticism, "I have. You know this. You know that I would not have stayed if it weren't true. But I am running, and you know that. You know that because you are the one who stayed. You look at me and you see why you could have run. When I look at you, I see why someone stays."

"Because it's easy to find them," Mark replies, and sits up with a faint groan. "Look, none of this is news, everyone knows I'm not going anywhere." 

After all, hadn't that been the reason he'd even bothered to _attend_ the depositions, day after day, when he could probably have made it all unnecessary by settling before it started? He'd needed to say it, somehow.

He still wants to say it, some days, although it's easier now to be satisfied with just thinking it.

_I win because I get to stay where I belong. I win no matter how many times you tell me I'm losing. And the money might add up to a parking ticket, in the overall scheme of things, and not matter to me in any case, but it matters to me that I get to keep what I've made, I get to stay with it, I get to stay who I am even if no-one likes that person, and you can say what you like and demand whatever you want, but I'm here, and I win every time because I don't leave and I don't run and I don't demand anything except acknowledgement._

That last is always what he's wanted, as far back as he can remember, further back than the Ad Board, when he _did_ say it out loud. 

Acknowledgement of his worth. Acknowledgement by _others_ , however much they openly didn't like him and thought (still think) that he was some kind of thief and betrayer and _said_ that's what he was and is, said it for posterity and made him into the villain whether he meant for it to happen or not.

So much that's been done, so much that _he's_ done, and he still only wants to see that look in people's eyes, the one that recognizes his value as a creator even while it discounts him as a man.

He sees it too often for comfort now, too often to pretend he doesn't know what it means, both the recognition and the discounting in all their layers, too often to pretend he doesn't care and can't be made to.

He never really understood before that to have what he'd made, to hold on to the things that were his and only his, he'd have to give up everything else.

Until the depositions, until Marylin's clear-eyed assessment of his situation and his nature, he hadn't known what price he was paying. He'd known what other people would feel, of course he had, but he hadn't allowed for how _he_ would end up feeling. He hadn't calculated the cost for a second, however clearly he tells himself he'd been seeing things.

It frightens him a little that even now, he'd still pay it.

"None of this is news," he repeats, and Lisbeth's still, calm expression doesn't change. He almost wishes it would, that she could be among the people who feel they have the right to judge him. He's never asked for someone to understand the _why_ of what he does and what he once did, he's never asked for anything but a simple acceptance of the facts.

He doesn't know why that's so hard for everyone, why it's so hard to accept facts without necessarily understanding them, only that it is hard, it is apparently impossible, and he's never met anyone other than Lisbeth who finds that difficulty incomprehensible.

"No," Lisbeth agrees. "And I'm not trying to change that. I'm just doing what I've always known how to do, I'm in someone's files and in their mail and in their head, and if you don't want to know any more, I don't mind. But I think you should still know I've done it."

"And you found out what?"

"Nothing interesting," Lisbeth says, and shrugs. "He isn't very interesting, this man. Why do you care?"

"I —" Mark starts, and has no idea what he can say. _I don't_ would be a lie, and anything else might not be actually lying, but it would be so far from the truth that he might as well be lying outright.

What can he say?

_I know he's not interesting?_

No, because that's not true, at least not for him, though to a hacker like Lisbeth, Wardo's files and mail and what he chooses to put on his computer that even vaguely resembles how he thinks can't be interesting at all.

Lisbeth brings down empires, after all. She could have brought him down, if she'd been approached back then, and Mark's grateful no-one thought of it.

_He's more interesting than you think?_

No, because Lisbeth knows what she thinks, and for her it's nothing _but_ truth. She will never be brought to a point where she ever doubts her conclusions.

_I wish you hadn't done this?_

Yes. And no. And yes.

_I wish you hadn't done this because now you feel you've got the right to know him?_

Oh yes, and a thousand times yes, but what right does _he_ have, to say he _does_ know Wardo, any more? How can he say he knows someone who can tell him coldly, after everything Mark thought they'd shared and everything he assumed was implicitly understood, that everything is finished, that nothing matters but a parking ticket, that his life's work is irrelevant, that it boils down to nothing but a darkened hallway and a single sentence that was not what he intended to be heard?

Eduardo had heard intent —

_you're going to be left behind —_

and not the truth —

_I'm afraid —_

and no hacking into Eduardo's computer will tell Lisbeth any of that.

"Mikael's computer isn't interesting either," Lisbeth says, and that _does_ get Mark's attention. "What he was working on. When I first helped him. That was interesting. But his computer — no. It was not his reflection."

"Yours is," Mark says, beginning to understand what she's saying.

"Yes," she says, and repeats, "and yours is. Because of who we are. What we are. To lose what we keep there would mean a kind of destruction. When I was first thinking of working with Mikael, I lost — I thought I would lose — everything. It was broken, my computer was broken, they — it got smashed, and I thought for a while I would never recover any of it. It hurt," she finishes simply, as if that little statement can possibly encapsulate all she's trying to say.

"What did you do?" Mark asks. His mouth feels dry. He never wants to talk about this side of it, and he's woefully under-equipped to talk at all after so little sleep and a very sudden and unpleasant wakefulness.

"I think there was a broken bottle," Lisbeth says, frowning. "I don't quite remember. I made them go away, though."

Mark hadn't been that brave, on the day Eduardo brought his laptop crashing down into annihilation and information loss and a jolting awareness of what he had done that was far, far worse than all of that. He had let Sean do his worst, too stunned at what he had unleashed to even begin to protest — and yes, too viciously, terribly glad that Eduardo, too, was experiencing that sense of disorientating loss to want to try.

At first.

Just at first.

And that was all it had taken, and then it was too late to make anyone take anything back, or even to ask if it was possible.

_You didn't have to be so hard on him,_ he had said, still shaking a little and hoping no-one could see.

And it hadn't mattered, in the end, what Sean's reply was, because Mark had read what Sean really wanted to answer in his eyes.

_Yeah I did. He was on you. So I did have to be._

Sean would have been kinder, perhaps, more conciliatory certainly, if he hadn't been so aware of what Eduardo's gesture had meant to Mark. Sean is by nature a disturber, but he likes to make things break under their own weight, not be the destroyer himself.

Sean, Mark thinks randomly, would like Lisbeth a lot. He could watch her bring things crashing down around everyone's ears and delight in the destruction from a safe distance; he would never have to be involved with her actions, and would appreciate them for what they are.

_You had one friend,_ Eduardo had said later, but that wasn't true then and it still isn't. Mark's fault has never been that he puts everything in one place, makes it all irretrievable if one thing is lost.

That's Eduardo, not him.

Friendship did, does, mean so much of what Eduardo gave him, but it's also Sean, who will get directly involved for the sake of a person, never mind what he says in public about companies; it's Dustin, who stays around even though he probably won't be with the company for much longer, because he's as much of a creator as Mark is and needs to be somewhere where he can be just that; it's Chris, who says in interviews that he prefers being Mark's friend to working with him, and makes people revise how they look at the situation.

Chris, changing the world and always fighting to make people see the things that are right and true and good in it; Dustin, showing Mark how to live in it, more patient than Mark deserves and his loyalty more steadfast than anything Mark can ever earn; Sean, destroying the status quo because he can and because sometimes people matter more to him than his image does.

Mark has never only had one friend. He knows this.

What he's never understood is why Eduardo was the one who mattered the most, even before he lost him.

"We get to choose so much," Lisbeth says. "We are lucky, you and I, because we know what we should choose and what we must pay for that choice. But I think sometimes we forget that love is no choice at all. If it were, we wouldn't."

"Because it hurts," Mark says, and Lisbeth nods.

"And who would choose hurt? No-one. No-one else would. We do. I run, and you stay, and Mikael stays where I can always find him, and your Eduardo has sent himself where he thinks no-one could be troubled to find him. And we are wrong and they, I think, are wrong too."

Mark blinks at her, because this is in no way what he was expecting to hear.

"They are?"

"But of course," Lisbeth says. "Mikael could find me, follow me if he wanted. Eduardo could come back. What would it cost them?"

"Their right to choose," Mark says dully, but Lisbeth is smiling for the first time.

"Yes. But you and I know it isn't a right. Because love —"

"— isn't a choice," Mark finishes.

"And we know that and they do not," says Lisbeth, and dumps her laptop on his knees. "I have found him for you. Now it's up to you. It's not a choice until you force it to become one."

"Yeah, you're kind of doing the forcing bit, here," Mark says, but he doesn't have the energy to point this out with any sort of emphasis.

"But that is what I do," Lisbeth says. "I see you, Mark. I know you because you are like me. And someone has to tell you what everyone knows, before you can see it too."

"Right, great, so I miss the obvious, I knew that already. Your point?"

Lisbeth shrugs. "Now you know. You have no excuse not to make a decision, because you have been told there is one you can make. It does not matter what you decide, not to me. But once you know something —"

"You have to act on it."

"Yes."

Mark stares at the laptop screen, and looks back up at Lisbeth.

"I don't know what to do," he says eventually.

"Yes," Lisbeth says, "and no. You know what you _want_ to do."

"And that counts?" Mark means his words to sting, because out of everyone, Lisbeth knows all the things that _counting_ can stand for.

"Yes," Lisbeth says, unaffected as ever, and she is still calm, and still smiling. "Of course it does."

She leaves him alone with his thoughts, and her work, and his last chance to even try to know what Eduardo is thinking, what he is doing, what he feels.

The chance is at his fingertips.

Lisbeth has given him the lines to read between.

All he needs now is the courage to do just that.

And when he makes his decision, it is hours later, and he hasn't moved, and he knows, coming back to himself, that Lisbeth has gone, perhaps back to where she came from in order to meet him, perhaps further afield, perhaps nearer to where she calls home. There's no way for him to know.

He hopes that one day he finds out what her decision was.

He hopes that she's wrong, and that Mikael is trying to find her.

He hopes that if she is right, she still finds the courage to go to Mikael of her own free will, and ask her question.

Mark hopes and wishes the best for her, because he is no longer sure (he has never been sure, not really) that he has the right to do this for himself.

For now, he has a decision to act upon. And that has to be enough.

 

**ix. [ _y2 = x (x — a^p)(x + b^p)_ ] {in the realm of things which do not claim actuality} [ _y^2 = x^3 + Ax + B_ ] {the point at infinity}**

_The first property of miracles,_ Mark says sometimes, and smiles as though he knows some secret that he's trying to share, _is that they shouldn't exist_.

Eduardo, who has his own secrets, and wants more than anything to relearn the language that once enabled him to share them, always disagrees, because that way he can make Mark talk, and he can listen, and he can pick up the words he once had no difficulty in using.

He still believes in gremlins, and the strange nameless power of a sleepless dark. 

But now he knows that there is such a thing as hope, and that maybe it really is a thing with feathers, and that wishing for something to be true doesn't make him a fool, and that waking isn't something to despise, and that his very own gremlin had a name, and it's one he's learning to love and not resent; and never be afraid of, any more.

Her name is Lisbeth. Her name is Wasp.

She is a hacker, and a killer, and a savior, and a survivor, and somewhere in the world, she exists and lives and breathes and proves a theorem to which no-one has ever found a satisfactory solution.

She created the Mark who came to find him, created him out of shadowy supposition and half-known fact; she knew it was possible, that unimaginable moment; she knew from the first time she met him in person, and saw her mirror image, that she could create him; she knew it could be done because he was always there, waiting to be made into all he is capable of being. 

She created something neither he nor Mark had dared believe in, and brought it into being not out of the infinite possibilities of some nebulous _perhaps,_ but from the things that were always there. She could do it because she had more courage than any of them, a strange easy courage that she didn't need for herself and so could spend quite freely. 

She created the Mark he now knows, more than any experience or loss or self-understanding could have ever managed to do if left to their own sad progress. She could do it, Eduardo thinks, because she had the strength to give an understanding of reality and all the choices of living to a man who had chosen self-exile far more than Eduardo's flight could ever have achieved, far more than he ever believed he had forced upon himself.

She did it for no-one but herself. She did it for no-one but her reflection. She did it for nothing but the chance of seeing what should be become a fact. She did it because (Eduardo thinks) she believes that the answer is _yes,_ that all proof is absolute, that nothing which exists can be called impossible.

Eduardo's very own gremlin, his shadow in the dark.

Mark's vision made real, appearing in the form of a tattooed girl with an infinite capacity for destruction and creation both, a living action-reaction who, not unaware, but too aware of what love could and can do, made herself walk through their lives, not as a proof or a result, but as a longed-for and much-needed catalyst.

There can be no creation without the knowledge of existence. Eduardo, who has found out he believes in souls, knows this to be true.

"The first property of miracles," he says, "isn't that they shouldn't exist. It's that they do. Or they wouldn't be a miracle."

Sometimes Mark laughs at that, and sometimes he disputes it, and sometimes he just groans and says that talking to Dustin would be easier.

Dustin, who has taken longer than anyone else to convince that this decided-upon reality is a good thing, because he is the only one who was able to find the strength to relinquish all that could have been and should have been into the past, and not hope, and to mourn.

Their absorption into the wrongs they have endured and perpetrated has cost everyone. And that, too, is part of belief.

And always, always, no matter the circumstances, no matter what else is taking his attention and needs more than Eduardo thought he could ever bear to see given elsewhere daily, Mark's answer to the question Eduardo never knew he was asking is _yes_.

The question is and was _am I enough?_

Not _for you._ Not even _for myself._ Never _for the world._ Only _am I?_

The answer is _yes_. The answer is _I love you._

The answer and the question belong to them both, they are their own antiphony.

The answer is contained in the way nights are sometimes shared, now, and the fact of Mark's sleeping furnace-heat beside him, wherever and whenever they decide it is time for that bed to be laid down upon.

Somewhere, it is always raining, and there is always glass for that falling water to beat against, and there will always be the capacity for destruction as well as creation for them to quantify.

Sometimes the question transmutes and translates into _Can this last?_

And the answer to that, Eduardo now knows, is not something that can be expressed in words, much though he loves to hear and return them. 

The answer is to live, and be alive within that living.

 

**x. {not by human reason for human reason}**

Lisbeth proves Fermat's theorem, and has it taken from her mind by the trajectory, not of an elliptic curve, but a bullet.

Lisbeth is found by Mikael, and is saved and is still the savior, and survives and lives and is alive.

Lisbeth finds the courage that she once longed to use upon herself, and instead turned towards others, and she comes to Mikael's door, and asks her question.

And she stands still, and hears him answer her aloud at last.

_Yes,_ he says.

But then, she has always known that will be his answer.

**

_...no three positive integers_ (a, b, _and_ c) _can satisfy the equation_ [a^n + b^n= c^n] _for any integer value of_ (n) _greater than two._


End file.
